It’s official: the Lawrence Hall of Science has become a cool place for students to hang out. They hosted an Out-of-This-World Halloween Party (that’s what it was called, not our synopsis), they have their weekly Geek Out nights (where you can pay $10 to hang out with fellow geeks and talk about SETI or design your own Mars space station) and this weekend they have their 40th annual Fungus Fair.

What does a person do at a Fungus Fair? The answer appears to be anything and everything you can think to do with a mushroom: finding, growing, viewing, eating, cooking, wearing, dyeing and even treating diseases. And yes, all the mushrooms are legal, we checked for you. read more »

Got any ridiculous(ly brilliant) and innovative entrepreneurial proposals but lack the cash to bring them to fruition in an unsympathetic economic climate and world that’s just not ready for your brilliance, anyhow? Well, don’t get ahead of yourself with the preemptive rejection consolations, the Bears Breaking BoundariesUnforgiven dvd competition has already passed. You can check out the winners though, if the desire to belittle some pretty interesting proposals with bitter mutterances like “psh, like that’ll ever work” should strike. read more »

OK, so admittedly, that was a kind of terrible pun. And considering we don’t know Alex Velez and Nikhil Arora personally, we can’t vouch for their fun-ness with a real degree of certainty.

However, we can tell you about BTTR Ventures—pronounced “better” and standing for Back To The Roots—which is the brainchild of the two Haas School of Business seniors. Under their leadership, BTTR Ventures has developed a fertilizer composed of cafes’ used coffee grounds and, in turn, employed that fertilizer in growing delicious-nutritious mushrooms. The production costs are low, the mushrooms themselves relatively cheap, and local jobs are already opening up as a result.

Moreover, by making use of those grounds, Velez and Arora have found an application for what is apparently “one of the most abundant waste streams in America.” Meaning that if BTTR Ventures evolves into the national network that the pair envisions, we caffeine fiends could continue to frequent our favorite cafes, feed our relentless addictions, and save the planet in the process.

If that’s not the true definition of “fun,” then we don’t know what is.